Tuesday, November 11, 2008

A peek into the mind

... of a deeply deluded but articulate conservative. I don't endorse P.J.'s opinions; I mention the article because I find his schizophrenia absolutely fascinating.

On the one hand, he seems to grasp, at least dimly, that conservatism failed not just on an effective level, but on a deeply moral level. And yet he still insists that the fundamental message of conservatism is moral.

Just as schizophrenic Christians justify human value by an appeal to the absolute, inherent human depravity, schizophrenic conservatives try to justify social cooperation by an appeal to every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. The doublethink really is spectacular.

A true conservative, I think, should be proud of the Bush regime: It's allowed the best of us (i.e. the richest) to accumulate their due, and left the liberals to herd the hoi polloi into compliance.

6 comments:

  1. Jeez, man, don't you ever sleep? PJ O'Rourke came late to conservatism. I attended a talk he gave in 2000 at UC Davis where he said, "I wasn't a Republican until I started making real money." He's a deeply funny man. However, I'm not so sure he's the best deep political thinker; for example, his book on Adam Smith wasn't very good.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I said he was articulate, not deep.

    The nice thing about PJ is that he pretty much says what he thinks; he doesn't make a lot of effort to obfuscate his delusions and contradictions.

    I've never understood the whole lot of money = Republican thing. If I had a shitload of money, I just couldn't think of anything better to spend it on than financing radical politics.

    ReplyDelete
  3. once u dedicated ure life to religion u gave into schizo stuff, i mean what could be more schizo than telling about love and mercy, while promising hell fire?
    After that, politically, anything is possible.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I can't tell when PJ is trying to be Colbert style funny and when he is serious... but Colbert could easily steal a lot of that material and you wouldn't notice it wasn't Colbert's character.

    But if you want to see real delusionality, check out Power Line's Hinderaker:

    http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2008/11/yet-more-evidence-that-right-wing.html

    ReplyDelete

Please pick a handle or moniker for your comment. It's much easier to address someone by a name or pseudonym than simply "hey you". I have the option of requiring a "hard" identity, but I don't want to turn that on... yet.

With few exceptions, I will not respond or reply to anonymous comments, and I may delete them. I keep a copy of all comments; if you want the text of your comment to repost with something vaguely resembling an identity, email me.

No spam, pr0n, commercial advertising, insanity, lies, repetition or off-topic comments. Creationists, Global Warming deniers, anti-vaxers, Randians, and Libertarians are automatically presumed to be idiots; Christians and Muslims might get the benefit of the doubt, if I'm in a good mood.

See the Debate Flowchart for some basic rules.

Sourced factual corrections are always published and acknowledged.

I will respond or not respond to comments as the mood takes me. See my latest comment policy for details. I am not a pseudonomous-American: my real name is Larry.

Comments may be moderated from time to time. When I do moderate comments, anonymous comments are far more likely to be rejected.

I've already answered some typical comments.

I have jqMath enabled for the blog. If you have a dollar sign (\$) in your comment, put a \\ in front of it: \\\$, unless you want to include a formula in your comment.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.